New York Life Gallery is pleased to present Scrap, an exhibition of new works by James Bantone. Bantone's practice interrogates how commercial imagery shapes our relationships to others and ourselves. He draws on Foucault's concept of the "entrepreneur of the self" as the paradigmatic subject of our neoliberal era, exploring how political and economic forces require us to market ourselves as commodities. Through his installations fusing photography, sculpture, painting, and video, Bantone's work examines this precarious relationship between subject and object in contemporary culture.
The images in Scrap are sourced from catalogs of display mannequin companies, featuring mannequins alongside their human doubles after whom they were modeled. This juxtaposition reveals the uncanny connection between the idealized, commodified figure and its human inspiration, with a keen awareness of all that is lost in translation. Bantone's works reappropriate the source material through layers of mediation and manipulation, distorting the images and the material on which they are printed to create a textural residue akin to wheatpasted street advertisements. The catalogs are Xeroxed, printed, and then applied to metal plates via acrylic transfer. These plates are fashioned out of discarded steel, which Bantone sprays with vinegar to create a layer of rust he then scratches off. Scraping the steel reveals patterns left by the surface's chemical reaction to the acid, a process which materializes the etymological link between 'scrap' and 'scrape'. Bantone transforms the detritus of industrial production, animating lifeless prefabricated materials through artistic intervention and biological processes.
Bantone revisits the Modernist symbol of the mannequin as both a mirror and a counterfeit of the human form. Its hollow, lithe, plastic body exemplifies how we mold ourselves to fit the measures of social and industrial standards. The mannequin takes on a melancholic quality in Bantone's works, a blank form onto which we project an idealized self-image, reminding us that our attempts to present ourselves are often as self-effacing as they are self-affirming. His works exist at the vanishing point where identity dissolves into objecthood, inviting viewers to question the role of the artist, and even of human subjectivity, under modernity's technological and economic constraints.
James Bantone (b. 1992 Geneva; lives and works in Paris) graduated with a Bachelor of Art & Media - Video at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2019 and completed the Work.Master Contemporary Artistic Practices at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) in 2021. He has had solo exhibitions at 032c Gallery, Berlin (2024); Spazio Maiocchi, Milan (2024); Swiss Institute, New York (2024); Karma International, Zurich (2023); and Coalmine, Winterthur (2020). He has participated in group exhibitions at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna (2024); Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau (2023); Kunsthalle Zurich (2023); Simian, Copenhagen (2023); Klemm's Gallery, Berlin (2023); Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2023); Centre d'Art Contemporain de Genève (2022); Cordova, Barcelona (2021); Kunsthalle Fribourg (2020); and UV Estudios, Buenos Aires (2019).